Man in a Blue Smock

The sitter worked at the Jas de Bouffan, the country house outside Aix-en-Provence that Cézanne's father, a banker, had bought in 1859. From about 1890 Cézanne used the men who worked the place as his models, and this one also posed for the Card Players. He painted him around 1896, in the blue cotton smock that French labourers wore.

The thing behind him is Cézanne's own beginning. The folding screen in the background is a real object, decorated by him around 1859, when he was 20, for the salon of that same house: elegant figures in an eighteenth-century pastoral manner, a woman with a parasol among them. It is the earliest work by him that survives, and it is now in the Musée Granet in Aix. In this canvas a farm labourer sits in front of it, and the woman with the parasol has no face.